Personal influence and the new paradigm : some inadvertent consequences
By: LANG, Kurt
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Contributor(s): LANG, Gladys Engel.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: Thousand Oaks : SAGE, November 2006The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science 608, p. 157-178Abstract: An examination of the reception given Personal Influence when first published points to highly selective interpretations of the findings. The claims reviewers made for the influence of interpersonal communication relative to the mass media, especially in the political process, went even beyond those advanced by the authors. They overlooked not only the very restricted conceptualization of "effects" that guided the Decatur research but also previously accumulated evidence on multiple kinds of media influence. This article argues that the new conventional wisdom pitting personal versus mass media effects associated with this and previous studies in the Columbia tradition discouraged, however inadvertently, a coming generation of sociologists from researching the effectsparticularly long-range effectsof mass communication. As a consequence, academic sociology came to cede much of the high ground it once occupied in media studies to political science and to more professionally oriented departments or schools of communication
An examination of the reception given Personal Influence when first published points to highly selective interpretations of the findings. The claims reviewers made for the influence of interpersonal communication relative to the mass media, especially in the political process, went even beyond those advanced by the authors. They overlooked not only the very restricted conceptualization of "effects" that guided the Decatur research but also previously accumulated evidence on multiple kinds of media influence. This article argues that the new conventional wisdom pitting personal versus mass media effects associated with this and previous studies in the Columbia tradition discouraged, however inadvertently, a coming generation of sociologists from researching the effectsparticularly long-range effectsof mass communication. As a consequence, academic sociology came to cede much of the high ground it once occupied in media studies to political science and to more professionally oriented departments or schools of communication
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